The Little Ditchman may be finding her sense of humor, and it may well catch up with mine sooner than we want, but this comes as a very welcome and joyful discovery, for there is no more uplifting sound in the world than your child's laughter. The old adage is most likely true: you are as happy as your most unhappy child.

So she has taken to singing "Ring Around the Rosies" lately, which is pretty cute. She'll lay in bed in the morning and just start singing it, and then move on to "Happy Birthday" or "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". "Pop Goes the Weasel" she often sings too, though there aren't really any words to the thing for her (it just goes: "dunh duh-dunh duh-dunh-dunh-dunh-dunh... POP! goes the weasel..." and on and on.)

So we're singing "Ring Around the Rosies" and "Pop Goes the Weasel" the other day and she was really getting into it and at one point she accidentally messed up the words, so she said, "...ring around the wozzel" -a wozzel being some kind of half-breed love-child of roses and weasels, I guess. Anyway, the Little Ditchman found this utterly hilarious: ring around the wozzel -and she can't make it through the song without laughing so hard she froths at the mouth. (No, seriously. She froths at the mouth. There's no explaining it.) Now, if I ever want to make her laugh, I just sing ring around the wozzel... It makes me laugh too now, just thinking about it. I sing it on my own, at work.

We won't go into the themes of deadly plague, poverty, child labor, and alcoholism from which these nursery rhymes originate.

Another thing that makes her laugh: driving back from Vegas a few weeks ago we were doing whatever we could to keep her from going insane on the drive, and I spontaneously picked up the Little Einsteins dolls we had and set them on the dashboard. They didn't quite fit up there, and a lane change or fast stop would make the dolls fall off. Every time they fell I would make the Wilhelm scream and add "Oh no!" and she would laugh her head off. (Poor Einsteins.) At one point, I opened the sunroof and closed it on their little hands where they would swing around, hanging there. Then I would click open the sunroof where they would fall (cue Wilhelm scream: "Aaaahh!") Of course, she thought this was the funniest thing in the universe and we had to do it OVER AND OVER -but it was funny every time. As we got tired of the game, the Little Ditchman would yell out, "I wanna see June hang! I wanna see Annie hang!" I found this oddly morbid, but when she demanded that Quincy hang, it got pretty funny for me, too. "I WANT TO SEE QUINCY HANG! MAKE QUINCY HANG!"

Quincy is the black one.




Preschool will be interesting. Have a good weekend. (There will be no lynchings.)


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